Of course you are pro trade. I am pro trade. We are all pro trade in exactly the same way we are pro puppy pictures and pro moms. All economic transactions are trade. To be pro trade is the same as to be pro employment or pro prosperity.

That is why 24 chapters freeing corporations from regulation are tacked onto the 6 chapters dealing with trade in the TPP. That way its proponents can call it a trade agreement despite it mostly not being one. This is important propaganda because no one is going to support a “freeing corporations from legal restrictions” agreement.

This is the principal behind calling trade deregulation ‘free trade.’ ‘Free’ is a positive term that puts a smiling face on deregulation. No one is going to support ‘unfair trade’ or ‘disastrous trade.’

But that is what trade deregulation has been for Canada. In the 2015 election Liberal campaign literature talked about how things were worse now for average Canadians than they were in the 1980s. The Free Trade agreement and NAFTA were both major contributors to this, effectively pulling the plug on Canadian manufacturing, eliminating well paying jobs and job security, and undermining our industrial economy.

TPP supporters talk a lot about opening markets for Canadian business. I wonder, as I live amongst the empty foundations of all the industries that once made Canadian products, markets for what exactly? Are you genuinely as short sighted as the CPC and think we will just sell all our natural resources to manufacturers elsewhere, just to purchase them back as shoddy products for ten times the price? Could you possibly think this can be a basis for an economy?

Or perhaps you are as deluded as the new Chancellor of Brock University in 2007 when I listened to him tell a convocation including may graduating Chinese foreign students that the future of Canada was to be the source of new ideas and technology, and that the future of countries like China was to be the labourers that made the products. The idea that we can build an economy based on research and services denies the fact that people elsewhere can develop their own technology.

I am pro trade, and pro employment, and pro prosperity. But while TPP supporters dangle the promise of these before us, the TPP itself is not intended to provide any such thing. It is almost entirely a corporate deregulation treaty intended to make multinational corporations immune to national laws. Rather than creating or supporting a ‘global economy’ it is purposed to make it easier for corporations to exploit the extreme inequity in the world’s discrete local economies for the benefit of the corporations themselves, and the obscenely wealthy tiny minority who control them almost entirely.

Please do not promote or support the passage of the TPP into law in Canada. I will be deeply ashamed if your government does so. I, like most Canadians am well fed up with being ashamed of my government. Please do not disappoint us.

People like ‘common’ sense ideas, and surely ‘speed kills.’ So ‘all cars must go slower’ seems like common sense. However if 50 is safer than 60, then surely 40 is safer than 50 and following this to its absurd conclusion, stopped is safer than 10. But I am quite certain this is not so.

First of all 60 is not very fast. If you cannot maintain ‘care and control’ on good pavement in normal conditions at 60, perhaps you should not be driving at all.

A lighted sign warns me every day that I am going too fast on Fairall St. Fairall/Station St. is a secondary road connecting two major arteries through an industrial area. It is the connection between downtown Ajax and the GO Station. That stretch of road is now signed 50, which, regardless of what Ajax decided, is clearly not democratically what almost anyone using that road agrees to. It could be worse though. There is a similar connecting road north of the 401 signed 40. No one using that road goes 40.

But Ajax is once again on about speeding and safety. This is absurd for many reasons.

The expected stopping distance for vehicles is based on tests from decades ago. Actual stopping distances for cars today can be less than half the regulatory standard.

Both roads and vehicles, here at least, are far better designed and safer than they were when speed limits were significantly higher. So the gap between what equipment and infrastructure is designed for and regulation is getting wider, speed limits less reasonable. That governments express concern that there is more speeding should not be surprising when traffic laws do not reflect what most people actually do and more importantly, what is actually safe.

Collisions between vehicles and anything else are more likely where there is more congestion. Consider reducing traffic speeds from 50 to 40. While no modern vehicle on a modern road in normal conditions is significantly safer to drive at the lower speed, traveling 20% slower increases trip time by a quarter. If every car on the road is out there 25% longer then there are 25% more cars on the road. This is certainly more dangerous.

Finally there are the two great hypocrisies of conflating traffic safety and ever-lower speed limits. One is that while municipal and provincial governments like to affect road safety policies, it is cheaper to just go on about speeding than it is to do anything useful. For instance changing speed signs is easier than requiring everyone to get drivers training. Second is that while reducing speed limits is unlikely to reduce accidents it is a large source of revenue in the form of speeding tickets. So lowering speed limits rather than being a safety measure could be viewed as increasing yield on traffic fine farming.

No male child ever took better advantage of having a type 1, 1950’s mom than I did. My mother took care of me. She cooked and cleaned and did my laundry. She did all the things her parents, puritanical Victorian Protestants born in the 1890’s, expected a good mother to do. And I lapped it up. Long after I moved away from home, my mom still looked forward to my visits when she could feed me and clean up after me. It was important to her. Taking care of me was her best way of showing that she loved me. And it was awesome, even though I did not always appreciate that awesomeness at the time. I am sure that if I could continue to take advantage of mum’s caring, I would.

Mum is going to be 97 this year. She still lives in her own home. But she is very hard-of-hearing and has very low vision. It has been years since it was a good idea for her to cook me a meal. She does a fair job of keeping her house clean, however there is a growing list of things she cannot, or perhaps, should not do. And there are plenty of things she needs done for her.

Mum really does not like this. I did not realize until her capacities began to diminish how strongly linked her self worth was to her service and independence. And I do not mean independence in the sense of self sufficiency. I refer to not asking for or getting assistance from anyone. That would be a weakness.

Growing old and infirm is particularly cruel for someone who has lived for most of a century believing that their virtue and worth are inextricably linked to hard work and servitude, especially in taking care of children and male family members.

Needing help equals ‘lazy’ equals sin.
Failing to take care of others and serve them equals ‘lazy’ equals sin.

It cannot be said that I am too intrusive in my mother’s life. I visit her every other weekend when possible and I do what I can to help her stay in her home. There is always a certain amount of anguish as, for instance, my mum feels ‘useless’ when I cook her a meal. She wants to cook for me not the other way around. This is hard on both of us, but I understand the dynamics of the situation and I do my best.

So, I get quite annoyed whenever I get criticized for the way I deal with my mums age-related shortcomings. I am not stupidly unaware of my mum’s feelings. I sympathize with her frustration at not being able to fulfill the role she was raised for. I understand that she is unable to change her idea of what it is for her to be a good woman even if that idea was made ridiculous fifty years ago. I would be selfishly fine with letting her take care of me, but she cannot. This is upsetting for her and her situation is upsetting for me. No derisive commentary from third parties who think they know better is either helpful or welcome. In fact it is very irritating.

Today I received an email from Ryan Spero representing the Liberal Party of Canada in response to a previous email I sent opposing the TPP. The response was unsatisfactory. So, here for all is my reply with his email appended.

Hello Ryan.

I would be particularly unobservant not to have noticed that while free trade advocates talk a lot about growing Canadian businesses and creating well-paying jobs, what we have inevitably gotten from free trade is the disappearance of domestic manufacturing, the disappearance of well-paying secure jobs, and wage depression.

More disgustingly the only thing that is meant by “provide choice and lower prices to Canadian consumers” is that corporations are free to exploit inequities between discrete isolated economies, to outsource work to low wage workers, to cut their costs and increase their profits. I work in the publishing industry. I am a highly skilled professional. And yet I am severely underemployed specifically because companies are allowed to take the work I used to be well payed for and get it done for 2$/h, badly, by exploited workers in India. There can be no happy face put on this.

Moreover “a full and open public debate in Parliament” with a majority government sitting, does not in any way “ensure Canadians are consulted on this historic trade agreement.” The negotiations are closed on the TPP. You cannot rewrite it. If you pass the TPP it will be in the form badly and secretly negotiated by representatives of the 99 CPC sitting opposite.

Supporters of massive trade agreements talk as though there has never yet been trade between the involved countries, that without effectively handing the regulation of trade over to the corporations being regulated we would never export or import anything again. And this is a nonsense. The reason interested parties advance these sweeping omnibus agreements is that all the evils of deregulation can be secreted within the impenetrable forest of legalese.

If you want to grow the Canadian economy you have to find ways of rebuilding wealth-generating industries on the desolate foundations of the factories we have torn down and abandoned all over Canada since the original PC Free Trade agreement was signed. Passing the TPP into law will not achieve this in any way.

Thanks
davemckay

On 2015/12/17 11:34, Ryan Spero (Info Liberal) wrote:

Ryan Spero (Liberal / Assistance)

Dec 17, 11:34

Hello Friend,

Thank you for writing to the Liberal Party of Canada regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The Liberal Party of Canada strongly supports free trade, as this is how we open markets to Canadian goods and services, grow Canadian businesses, create good-paying jobs, and provide choice and lower prices to Canadian consumers.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership stands to remove trade barriers, widely expand free trade for Canada, and increase opportunities for our middle class and those working hard to join it. Liberals will take a responsible approach to thoroughly examining the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The former Conservative government failed to be transparent through the entirety of the negotiations – especially in regards to what Canada is conceding in order to be accepted into this partnership. We have an obligation to be open and honest about the negotiation process, including informing Canadians about the impact this agreement will have on different industries across our country. We must defend Canadian interests during the TPP’s ratification process – which includes defending supply management, our auto sector, and Canadian manufacturers across the country.

Under Liberal leadership, our government will hold a full and open public debate in Parliament to ensure Canadians are consulted on this historic trade agreement.

The Conservatives had a trade deficit for more than 50 months and they have tallied the largest trade deficit in Canadian history. Our government remains committed in ensuring that, with respect to international trade agreements, middle class Canadians will benefit and are informed about the implications of such agreements.

Thank you again for taking the time to share your concerns with us on this important economic initiative.

I get regular emails from the Liberal party. I got one today from Bill Morneau, Minister of Finance. They are planning an event where he sits down with someone for dinner and listens to what they and their guests have to say. I could be the lucky one, but not likely. This was my response.

Hi, Bill.

You would not want to visit my house. It is a bit of a tip. I have been having a hard time affording maintenance since all the skilled publishing work I used to be well payed for has gone off to places like India to be done badly, but cheaply, by people making $2 per hour.

That is one of the reasons why Canadians need you to make a commitment to rejecting the CPC’s TPP. If you do not, things are going to get much worse. Instead of deregulating the depredations of multinationals, we need you to fix a system skewed to the economic advantage of corporations and the richest people who control them.

Raise taxes, but raise taxes on the rich a lot. One of the key strategies of the Corporatist Party of Canada government you just replaced was to starve the government to death by cutting taxes. While this conforms well to the discredited philosophy of small government and trickle-down economics, all it has really been for is to cripple Ottawa so that the current incarnation of the Reform and Alliance parties could gain more autonomy for Alberta. This has to stop, and taxes, especially on the people who have grown obscenely wealthy on tax cuts, need to increase.

I do not wish to see the 99 CPC seats opposite you chortling away as you do their dirty work for them and take the blame.

We need stronger laws governing the actions of corporations, and we need those corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. What we really do not need is to pass into law a giant omnibus treaty that fundamentally undermines the ability of your government to make these necessary changes.

First of all, I am very relieved that 55.7% of voters in Ajax decided to reelect you. Congratulations.

Lots of the evil that the CPC did will be easy to fix, and some of it not so. It is simple to unmuzzle scientists and government employees. It is hard to replace destroyed libraries and the lost research they housed. One thing that will be quite difficult is dealing with the CPC’s Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

I want to be absolutely clear here. I oppose the TPP. This is a position I share, as far as I know, with everyone I know. While, in conversation, people have said that they are also concerned about the possible penalties for not passing the TPP into law, I have not heard anyone say they think its many sinister corporatist provisions will make the lives of most Canadians better.

The agreement is full of traps for ordinary Canadians. For example, changes to copyright will make using my iPod to play my CDs illegal. This may seem trivial. But being forced to rebuy 471 albums would cost me thousands of dollars. This appears to be a typical abuse of the trade agreement to impose changes that only pump money faster to the few percent of people who control corporations. The Liberal party ran a campaign based on the idea that inequity was an iniquity, that the richest should pay more, and that the economy should not be stacked in the favour of a tiny minority. The TPP contains many provisions intended to exacerbate inequity by allowing corporations to act in ever more exploitative ways to benefit the relatively few people who own them.

I cannot believe you do not understand this and other problems with the TPP. However I will quote Pete Dolack in his article for counterpunch shared by Government for all Canadians, not just the wealthy:

The TPP, if enacted, promises a race to the bottom: An acceleration of jobs to the countries with the lowest wages, the right of multi-national corporations to veto any law or regulation their executives do not like, the end of your right to know what is in your food, higher prices for medicines, and the subordination of Internet privacy to corporate interests. There is a reason it has been negotiated in secret, with only corporate executives and industry lobbyists consulted and allowed to see the text as it took shape.

In its thousands of pages, the TPP must contain some valuable undertakings for trade. However it has become a vehicle for covert negotiation of constraints Canadians and our government will regret for decades. It is in effect Stephen Harpers’ last omnibus bill, cloaking provisions no one should ever agree to.

I will be deeply ashamed if your government passes the TPP into law. I, like most Canadians am well fed up with being ashamed of my government. Please do not disappoint us.

“Everyone has their own way of doing things.” is sometimes a reasonable thing to say. For instance, I make peanut butter cookies differently than my mum did. She made them to suit her, and I make them to suit myself. This is cool because how I make peanut butter cookies doesn’t matter.

In my professional life, how I work matters. If I set up files in unpredictable ways to suit myself I am being unprofessional. A large portion of my career has been spent going through supplied work, searching for and correcting problems I cannot ignore because at some point I am going to have to sign off jobs I have worked on.

More often than not there is a right way and a wrong way. As Tim Minchin said you do not normally argue whether it is better to leave an, “apartment by the front door, or a window on the second floor.”

Along come political philosophers. Like people who feed pet cats vegetarian diets and can’t understand why Fluffy is dying, political ideologues can’t understand that reality does not bend to fit their ideas. They make up stuff about economics, taxes, civil society and etc. that need not represent any observable reality. Then when it all goes wrong, or the public rebels, we ‘just did not try hard enough.’ They say if we just give them five more years everything will come up daffodils.

This is of course, the most generous interpretation of the disconnection between what is promised, and what actually happens. It is hardly likely that a corporatist believes in trickle-down economics since it has never worked anywhere. The reality is that like cult leaders, time immemorial, their spiel doesn’t need to work, it just needs to subvert dissent and allow them to implement their own, often-contrary agenda, unhampered.

Conservative: holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation

Radical: advocating or based on thorough or complete political or social reform; representing or supporting an extreme section of a political party.

Canada once had a federal Conservative party. Although it was progressive, the governments it formed traditionally tended not to change things much or quickly. There is no trace of Progressive Conservatism in federal politics anymore. And when Stephen Harper talks about ‘Conservatives’ as though there is continuity between his CPC and historic PC governments, he is entirely disingenuous.

Just as any dictator cloaks their manifest self-interest in words that sound like the best interest of people, the CPC keeps telling us that their road to ruin is the road to prosperity. No matter how far they have lead us down that road they keep telling us we will arrive in Prosperityville any minute now.

There is a wrong way of doing government. Austerity, lower taxes, deregulation, privatization, secrecy, deceit, and patronage among so many other antisocial policies have not in one instance ever made the public better off. If you did not learn from the 19th and 20th centuries that government spending on public services, good wages, and dignified workplaces make societies better, then you need to do some revision.

The CPC is not a conservative party at all. It is the Radical Party of Canada. For a decade it has been using a shroud of nonsensical rhetoric to implement extremely destructive radical changes to Canada, all while telling us this is the way to paradise. Nothing about the places they are leading us resemble anything but a darkening wood.

Parliament works for you. If I do bad work for clients, in pursuit of my own agenda, they will not hire me again. If I make you a batch of peanut butter cookies that taste bad and make you seriously ill, you should not accept cookies from me again.

So, on Monday, for your own sake, for pity’s sake, I ask you to reject the cloak of dishonesty the CPC hides their war against Canada behind. Get out and vote for a candidate whose party does not play Canadians for fools.

There is a difference between profit and profiteering. Where the line, that divides the two, is drawn can be hard to measure exactly. However in recent economic times the prevalence of grave inequity makes the extremes easy enough to see.

I define profit as the difference between the value of a product and the cost of making it. On the other hand profiteering is in the difference between what something is reasonably worth (the bit that may be tricky to define exactly) and the price of it.

For instance profiteering is evident when a worker is underpaid for their labour so their employer can keep a larger share. I know many people working for less now than they were at the turn of the century despite being more skilled and experienced than they were a decade an a half ago. Skills and experience have increased the value of their work for which they are now paid less. The companies paying them less and keeping the difference are profiteers.

The other way round, drug patent buyers who acquire the rights to existing prescription drugs then vastly inflate the price are profiteers. In such a case the actual value of the product is easy to determine. A pill with a stable price of $13.00 for many years, in the absence of any shortage of raw materials or the like is pretty certainly worth $13.00. Anyone who would double the price to pocket the difference is a profiteer.

“Yay! I wanna be a profiteer.” And why would you not? A profiteer increases their capital without producing anything of value to achieve it. What could be the downside?

The downside is that, all conditions being equal, an hour of work is worth an hour of work. A pill is worth a pill. If we allow profiteers to operate as they are, the real result is that the value of your work and capital just decreases. To take more and more value out of transactions without adding any material value, while that makes a small number of individuals or corporations rich, it stagnates economies and contributes to the impoverishment of the majority of people.

If I say, “carpetbagger” you shouldn’t have a positive image come to mind. But carpetbaggers were profiteers and like profiteers of all ages caused widespread hardship. It is about time we put an end to profiteering. Otherwise we are likely to see the end of democracy, civil society and the dignity of most people’s lives.

Periodically Adobe tempts me to get Creative Cloud and start paying them a large subscription fee monthly, forever. The temptation is to get access to all of Adobe’s latest software at one low price… That low price however is almost three times what the amortized cost of Creative Suite ever was. Moreover once you subscribe nothing prevents Adobe from hiking the price. And you can never stop paying, because you never own software you can go on using.

Today I received an ad email that stated that I could “Lock in your price for up to two years!” Which if you think about it is a promise to raise the subscription price within two years.

I recently found on my iPad, in Adobe Reader, an offer that I could pay an additional $11.99 per month to make PDFs! Really? I have been making PDFs without paying a subscription to Adobe for more than 20 years.

This is a company that spent more than $1671 million on “Sales and Marketing” in 2014. That is about twice what they spent on Research and Development and more than 47% of their gross profit of about $3525 million. Adobe is not a software company. It is an advertising machine.

Also look at their R&D budget. Adobe spent a bit more than $844 million in 2014 on R&D. At any given time in the last 20 years you should admit that any particular Adobe product has been mostly resolved already. So if they are paying R&D (coders, testers and etc.) $100 per hour (That would be a lot, I know.) that would imply that Adobe employs more than 4500 researchers and developers full time to work on products that are always mostly researched and developed already. The Adobe product line never needed almost eight and a half million hours of redevelopment in 2014.

Adobe’s financial statements are here (http://www.adobe.com/investor-relations.html) if you want to gasp for yourself. Be prepared to use the words exploitative and monopoly.

Verm fiddled with his jacket, the one she had given him. He waited in the dim light outside the apartment they shared, for the bitch to show up. Surely she would just return her key and go.

A ‘w’ would have been more appropriate than a ‘b’. What right had she to be so upset about the other women? Hadn’t she as much as admitted once that she fancied some guy in IT? And, “it’s the thought that counts” isn’t it?

There she was, coming up the street. “Oh gods,” she’d been crying again. Verm didn’t need this, he just wanted her to give him her key. She paused, smeared some running mascara on a sleeve and composed herself.

“Hello Worm,” she said but he did not exactly understand what she said next. He felt dizzy and everything else felt big, bigger, confusion.

She sniffed and picked up the jacket. Gathering up the other clothes she shook out a small thing and placed it in under a shrub. She went inside to make a cup of tea.